JonBenet Ramsey's death a tragic, bizarre case from the start

In-fighting, politics and the path to the grand jury

Flowers rest in the snow outside the Ramsey family s home on 15th Street in Boulder on Dec. 26, 1997 the one-year anniversary of the day 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey s body was discovered. (Associated Press file photo)

From its very first hours, it was clear that everything about the JonBenet Ramsey case would be different from virtually any investigation those involved had seen before.

The core elements included the victim, a beautiful 6-year-old girl, who in her short life had dazzled her way to the title Little Miss Colorado; the crime scene, a luxurious, 7,092-square-foot Tudor-style home in an upscale university neighborhood; the parents, a mother who once represented West Virginia in the Miss America pageant, a father who served as president of a computer distribution firm that had just registered more than $1 billion in annual sales.

And there was the tragic and bizarre crime itself.

Camera file photo

The Daily Camera has confirmed that the grand jury investigating the death of JonBenet Ramsey voted to indict John and Patsy Ramsey on charges of child abuse resulting in death but then-District Attorney Alex Hunter refused to sign the indictment and prosecute the case.

JonBenet was reported missing Dec. 26, 1996, in a frantic 5:52 a.m. 911 call in which Patsy Ramsey told Boulder police she'd found a ransom note on the spiral staircase leading down to the kitchen, demanding the head-scratching figure of $118,000 for her daughter's safe return. No follow-up call was ever made to actually collect that money.

Instead, JonBenet's lifeless body was discovered early that afternoon in a little-used room of the family's cellar by her father and a family friend, after the lone detective still on the scene suggested they look around to see if they found anything amiss.

JonBenet was discovered with tape across her mouth, a ligature buried deep in the skin of her neck through use of a garrote fashioned from cord and a broken paintbrush taken from her mother's art supplies. Some of the same cord was loosely bound around her right wrist. Not noticed until the autopsy was that she'd also suffered a linear fracture to the right side of her skull, likely the result of a single blow from a blunt object.

The cause of death would be ruled asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma. There were signs of vaginal trauma, although debate would ensue as to whether it predated the time of the murder. Similarly, marks on her body were interpreted by some as having been caused by a stun gun. Other investigators have dismissed the stun gun thesis.

So many interpretations have been advanced over time of the forensic evidence in the case -- exacerbated by a highly contaminated crime scene -- that it quickly came to resemble a criminalist's Rorschach test, each piece of the puzzle easily lending itself to the perspective of the person reviewing it.

Perception of the parents

Beyond the facts of the crime as they became known in the days immediately following the discovery of her murder, there was the behavior of JonBenet's parents, viewed as unusual by police and by the public at large.

After remaining unavailable to Colorado media for any comment about the loss of their youngest child, John and Patsy Ramsey popped up in the middle of the nation's football and festivities for a New Year's Day interview broadcast from CNN in Atlanta, where they had gone to bury JonBenet.

Eyebrows were raised after the Ramseys hired a squadron of lawyers, including Hal Haddon, one of the most highly respected criminal defense lawyers in Colorado. The attorneys' subsequent retention of a Washington, D.C.-based public relations consultant did little to help public perceptions of the family.

This, combined with law enforcement sources' complaints that the parents were proving uncooperative, stoked public suspicion of both John and Patsy Ramsey, which was only heightened by the fact that they declined to submit to detailed police interviews until April 30, 1997, more than four months after the discovery of their daughter's body.

The Ramseys and their supporters would subsequently explain their reticence to cooperate more fully from the outset by claiming an early conviction that the police were focused on them as the prime suspects, to the exclusion of an outside intruder who they contended was truly responsible.

To the grand jury

The case was brought before the Boulder County grand jury starting in September 1998, only after then-Gov. Roy Romer summoned Hunter's team to Denver to explain their handling of the investigation. By that summer, the case was plagued by disarray and a snakepit of law enforcement infighting.

The dysfunction in which the case was enveloped was laid completely bare when one key investigator, Boulder police Detective Steve Thomas, wrote an exhaustive, blistering resignation letter chastising Hunter for timidity and labeling the DA's office as "thoroughly compromised."

Thomas made his letter public Aug. 6, 1998 -- the day JonBenet would have turned 8 years old.

The Thomas letter was answered a little more than a month later by yet another resignation letter, this time from Colorado Springs homicide investigator Lou Smit. One of several outside experts drafted by Hunter's team, Smit, in his letter, said he could no longer serve a prosecution team that he believed was wrongly targeting the Ramseys in defiance of evidence that he was convinced spoke to the involvement of an intruder.

It was against that backdrop of political tension and many frayed relationships inside and outside law enforcement that the grand jury began to hear evidence in the case.

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